I was a Democratic poll challenger in Detroit. I watched the absentee vote count and can assure you that Trump and the GOP's fraud claims are nonsense.
- Absentee ballots were counted accurately and securely in Detroit.
- Republican challengers were in the room at all times.
- GOP challenges were an extension of their national strategy of suppression.
- Ned Staebler was a Democratic Poll Challenger at the TCF center in Detroit on November 4, 2020.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Just two days after Election Day, President Donald Trump stood at the podium of the White House press briefing room and levied numerous baseless claims about the legitimacy of absentee vote counting in Detroit. The city is a stronghold for Michigan Democrats and helped tip the scales towards now President-elect Joe Biden in our state.
After listening to the president's attacks on the process in the city, I want to share what I observed over 15 hours as a Democratic party ballot challenger at TCF Center, the city's absentee ballot processing site. Given the level of misinformation circulating about what went on inside TCF—much of it perpetuated by our own president—I want to set the record straight.
The ballot counting process
I went to TCF after I learned that throngs of Republican challengers had begun arriving there around midnight on election night. My mandate — the same for all challengers regardless of affiliation — was to observe the process, raise a challenge if I had a legitimate reason to believe the law was not being followed, and contest any baseless challenges raised by others.
I saw election staff working incredibly hard to count 165,000 absentee ballots in two days. For context, that's nearly three times as many as were processed in 2016.
The election workers were professional, efficient, diligent, and dedicated. They were working in a fishbowl with, at times, eight or 10 people crowding around them and yelling and harassing them about their work. These predominantly older, Black women wore masks and risked exposure to COVID-19 in a city that for much of the spring was a COVID-19 hot spot. They didn't get paid very much, but never ever complained. They were heroes.
I also saw diverse and dedicated Democratic and nonpartisan volunteers. Our job was simple: do everything we could (within the law) to shield the election workers from a withering barrage of unwarranted abuse from our GOP counterparts.
Repeatedly, we called supervisors and even police to blunt the attempts of the GOP challengers to slow, stop, muddy, or otherwise derail the process. We didn't have much to eat. We wore the wrong shoes. Our phones were dead or dying the whole time. We alternated between way too hot or too cold. But, through it all we were laser focused on protecting our Democracy.
The GOP got their challengers, despite what they claim
That brings me to the final group of people I saw: the GOP poll challengers. In contrast to our goal, a speedy and secure tabulation of legal ballots, they had a single mission: to slow down or stop the counting as much as possible.
They had been told and were exhorted repeatedly by Republican organizers throughout the day to "be more aggressive." They bullied. They complained. They accused everyone of fraud. They documented everything. They challenged everything. At times they challenged ballots before the ballots were even opened. At times, they tried to "blanket" challenge thousands of ballots at a time for some ridiculous reason or another. Blanket challenges are not legal.
When one of their challengers was removed for physically intimidating election workers and refusing after multiple warnings from supervisors to stop, the entire floor of workers cheered.
Why? Because these largely white, suburban, and rural challengers hurled insult after insult at hard-working, predominantly Black Detroiters — mostly women — simply trying to do their difficult jobs.
They accused them of fraud. They attacked their competence and their motives and their professionalism. They stood too close. They leaned in and over workers in the middle of a pandemic. They were rude and at times downright threatening. One was removed for asserting his First and Second Amendment rights (think about that for a minute) in response to a request to step back a couple of feet.
Claims that GOP challengers were denied access to the room are utter nonsense. Each party was allowed 134 challengers (one for each table), in addition to lawyers. At one point there were at least 230 Republican challengers signed into the room and access to the room was stopped for everyone because the room was at capacity. This caused the GOP to file a lawsuit. Ironically, they filmed an interview about this lawsuit with the media from inside the room they claimed they were denied access to.
The entire process was a microcosm of the current dynamic between our two parties. The GOP wants to disenfranchise and discourage and suppress democracy. The Democratic Party wants everyone to be empowered in the process and their voice and vote to matter.
My experience inside TCF only further underscored for me the work that needs to be done to fight voter suppression in America. But it also gave me hope for the future of this effort. I saw a lot of ugliness in that room, but I also saw a diverse group of people — Black and white and Asian and Hispanic, students and retirees, union reps, voting rights activists, community organizers, people of all religions, and folks from the entire gamut of sexual identity and expression—working hard to protect the Democratic process and ensure every legal vote in that room was counted.
I entered TCF at 9 am and left 15 hours later, hungry, exhausted and clear that our efforts were not the end to the process, but another step forward in the movement to ensure that in every city and every community of color across America, every vote counts.
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